


Martyrs of the Great Plains

by nookienostradamus



Category: The Exorcist (TV)
Genre: Anal Sex, Awkwardness, Bad Decisions, Banter, Bickering, Confession, Crying, Demons of the personal kind, Descriptions of martyrdom, Guilt, Heavy heavy Catholicism, Illness, Latin, Like SO many saints, Lust, M/M, Mentions of past child abuse, Oral Sex, Prayer, Religious Content, Religious Symbolism, Rock 'n' roll, Saints, Scars, Sexy Bible talk, Tomas and Marcus's Big Gay Road Trip, Vomiting, adoration, fantasies, mentions of past sexual abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-10
Updated: 2017-11-10
Packaged: 2019-01-31 13:21:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12682752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nookienostradamus/pseuds/nookienostradamus
Summary: After the demon was banished from the Rance family in Chicago, Marcus Keane and Tomás Ortega make their way westward, still unable to see the extent to which they are bound to each other. Marcus isn't sure if what he wants is to know God again, or to know Tomás - or if they're one and the same. As the two pass through small towns in a cold Midwestern November, Marcus battles the kind of demons a man can never truly exorcise: desire, guilt, bitterness, rage. And he eventually finds that what he had been searching for was within his reach the whole time.Set between Season 1 and Season 2. I've taken some liberties with timeline and back stories.





	1. Saint Libertine of Agrigento

They shared motel rooms on the journey west—the priest and the man. What was one called when one was, as Marcus was, no longer a priest? Not layman, for certain. He was too immersed, like tea leaves gone limp and bitter in the pot. Though an Englishman to his marrow, he had never been one for tea. Good whiskey, on the other hand...

Red wine would always be reserved for sacraments; it had never looked right sloping in the bowl of a glass clutched by a laughing yuppie.

There were none of that particular stock in the bar where Marcus sat with Tomás, each across from the other in the vinyl booth, the man and the priest. These were rougher people, with broad, worn hands and faces to match. One or two of the women wore short skirts and crop tops. Their long legs ended in heels and were bare to the November chill. The gazes of the men followed them around the room—from the bar to the jukebox to the rickety billiards table, where the women sipped at pink cocktails and kissed the cheeks of the winners. Many of the staring men kept their heavy leather motorcycle jackets on. Bearded, with flaming skulls and crossed rifles on their backs, they dabbed at their sweating foreheads with bar napkins.

“In a different place tonight?” Tomás asked, his gentle voice cleaving through the noise.

On a dirty television screen above the bar, an overweight man in a maroon vest threw darts with the concentration of a child in prayer.

Marcus turned, meeting Tomás’s eyes over the half-drained beer.  Amber light through the glass wobbled on the table. “No,” he said. “Right here.”

“Looking for signs of demonic presence?” Tomás was straight-faced, but Marcus knew him well enough now to understand this was a joke.

Tomás shifted in his seat but didn’t adjust the stiff clerical collar. He never seemed to need to once it was in place. Like the thing was an extension of his neck. _He sits in his body like a man in a favorite armchair_.

Marcus—fidgety, manic Marcus—had never dwelt so easily in his own skin. His own collar used to itch and slide, the gaps giving up the occasional scent of nervous sweat from within his shirt. Tomás smelled like antiperspirant and whatever he put in his hair. Occasionally a mild smell of warm earth, or sharp like an oil-burning fireplace when he was frightened.

Marcus raised his glass and sniffed the metallic rankness of his beer. “Demons favor the innocent,” he said.

That made Tomás laugh, his lips drawing back over straight, white teeth, calling up faint wrinkles at the outer corners of his eyes.

The same lines had been etched into Marcus’s skin by time, now present whether he smiled or not.

“By the blood of the Lamb, all may be washed clean,” said Tomás, still grinning.

Marcus gave an exaggerated huff. “We haven’t the time nor the blood.” There came a squeal and clatter from the other side of the room. When Marcus craned his neck, he saw that one of the women had been invited to take up a cue at the pool table. She had slipped on the beer-drenched floor and now lay on the table face-down, giggling. The balls were scattered to the edges of the bald felt, the game forfeit. The woman’s denim skirt had bunched up in the fall and a man with a chin-strap beard gyrated behind her, close but not quite touching. One of the man’s buddies, who had lager foam in his mustache, helped her up. For his chivalry, she tottered on her too-high heels and kissed him on the mouth, froth and all.

Marcus smiled and turned away. It was absurd, the urge he had to protect Tomás. To shield his eyes like a fretting mother from the sight of the woman tugging down the hem of her skirt over pink lace panties.

“The joys of the flesh,” Tomás said, looking down at the pitted surface of the table but raising his glass in a mock toast.

“Something like that,” Marcus said. He watched the smooth and regular motion of Tomás’s throat as he swallowed the beer. _Cleanse thou me from secret faults…_

It would have been simple enough, were Marcus a simple man, to conclude that being stripped of his office after the Rance case had set loose his secular imaginings. But it was a lie. He had wanted Tomás long before the demon was severed. Once, Marcus recalled, he had clutched at Tomás’s face as he suffered in the grip of one of the thing’s illusions. That petroleum scent of panic bathed his face. A drop of cool sweat from Tomás’s hair had run down Marcus’s hand and pooled in the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. Tomás had shaken him away and fled the room. Marcus, with his back to the Rance family, had sucked away the sweat from his skin.

No one saw it, but the demon knew. In Casey’s ruined face, its eyes had the oily shine of _knowing_. Why it had never used the information against him he couldn’t guess.

“Do you think that people still believe in miracles?” Tomás asked. His dark eyes, starry from the closeness of the bare bulb overhead, had the unfocused look of reflection.

Marcus scratched his chin. “They believe in the term.”

Tomás, frowning now: “But not the fact?”

Pausing to take a sip of the quickly warming pint, Marcus then asked, “Is it fact?” It was meant as bait. Devil’s advocate had always been a part that Marcus had willingly and easily played. Although he held firm in his heart the truth of the miracles of Jesus, he found some claims on behalf of the saints ridiculous. Giuseppe da Copertino levitating like a Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon over the crowds on Saint Francis’s feast. Martin de Porres seen in two places at once, across the sea from each other.

“We have seen mysterious works,” Tomás said. “Together.” It was an unnecessary coda, but it sent a jolt of tingling warmth over Marcus’s skin.

“The work of the Devil does not a miracle make,” Marcus told him. He cocked an eyebrow. “Perhaps, my friend, the age of wonders has passed.”

“I see them in the strength of everyday people,” Tomás said, so suddenly earnest that it was breathtaking.

Marcus drained the last of his drink. He felt threadbare and old. “Maybe, if we stay long enough, we can see one here tonight.”

There was reproof in Tomás’s eyes.

Marcus struggled to pull his phone out of his jeans pocket. Nine forty-one in the evening of November third. Feast day of San Libertino, in the Italian. In the English, Saint Libertine. Not, unfortunately, known for his worldly vices. Libertine had been pious unto death. In some accounts, he was stabbed or stoned for trying to bring the faith to the pagans of Sicily. In others, he was beheaded alongside Saint Peregrinus when Diocletian tried to purge the Christians from Rome’s borders. The emperor would never live to see how badly he’d failed. The Church seeped into the languishing capital like water into limestone, inevitable. Down went old marble and gilt, up came new marble and gilt in its place. It drove staves into Europe and the New World, rooting out heresy with hands of flame.

If a man could hear history, Marcus thought, it might scream.

He shook his head. Again that urge to protect Tomás, to hide the septic fistulae of the church and with them his own thoughts. _Non videbis ossa mea_.

Saint Libertine: _You will not see my bones._ If every relic was authentic, then saints were thirty feet tall and had a hundred hands.

One corner of Tomás’s mouth was drawn up when Marcus looked at him again. “You _are_ somewhere else.”

Marcus set his glass down. “Maybe. Maybe.”

“We should sleep soon,” Tomás said, placing his own glass on the tabletop. It had a couple of swallows left in it; Marcus had never seen him completely finish a drink. “A lot of driving to do tomorrow.”

Their push westward had taken them from Chicago to this place, outside a town called Kirby in Wisconsin. Tomorrow, they aimed to plow through dervishes of November snow all the way through Minneapolis and on to Bismarck. Leaving the Great Lakes for seas of mown-down corn stalks that shivered in the long wait for spring.

Outside in only a henley and a light jacket, Marcus shivered, too. It was a blessedly short walk to the Roadside Inn, a squat collection of rooms arranged in an L-shape. No one had yet questioned their sharing a room. Not on the first night outside Milwaukee in an overpriced shack with particleboard doors. Not that night, either, as Tomás had opened his wallet and passed a few bills to the clerk.

The door to their room at the Roadside was hollow metal. It vibrated with a low and disgruntled sound when the wind hit at just the right angle. Sitting at the edge of his bed, Marcus let the laces of his shoes dangle between his fingers while he watched Tomás take off his shirt. He would stop at the white sleeveless undershirt, then go into the single bathroom.

Marcus would remind himself to take his shoes off while he listened to the sink run, the toilet flush. Then Tomás would emerge with a lazy smile, wearing a t-shirt and soft flannel sleep pants. He would yawn and stretch, Marcus silent and eager for the quick glimpse of olive skin between hem and waistband.

He would rouse his weary bones for his turn in the bathroom, knowing he would come out to find only an indistinct shape under the polyester comforter, dark hair and the tender curve of one ear visible.

Then Marcus would lie on his back, awake for a long while, listening for breath and the rustling of dreams.


	2. Saint Aemilianus of Tunisia

Marcus awoke when a white splinter of light pushed from between the heavy drapes covering the single window. Just before waking, he dreamt he had been covered by a shadow in his exact shape, or close to it, fitting along the outlines of his body. His arms were outflung across the mattress like the dying Christ, and the shadow arranged itself to mimic the pose. It was almost a challenge. _I go where you go_.

As dream-Marcus had watched, a white star burning at the shadow’s throat flared and resolved, became the notch of a clerical collar. It could have been Tomás, or else the specter of Marcus’s own priesthood come casually back around like a missing cat.

He swore he could feel breath on his lips when he woke.

The opposite bed was empty and looked like it hadn’t been slept in at all. His young companion was as fastidious as a Benedictine. His joints creaking with cold and stillness, After dressing quickly, Marcus got up and checked the bathroom. It, too, was silent and empty. A hand seized his heart, gripping tight.

Something thumped at the bottom of the outer door, making the metal shiver in the jamb.

“Marcus?” Tomás’s voice was muffled.

Marcus let out a sigh, shaking the panicked tension out of his lean frame. The blue light of full day greeted him as he opened the door. Cold air billowed into his face along with the smell of coffee and eggs.

Tomás held a cardboard drink holder in one hand and a greasy waxed paper bag in the other. “No hands left,” he said with a smile.

Marcus’s stomach twisted again, this time not with relief but with hunger.

“I tried to bring you breakfast in bed,” said Tomás, still smiling. White packets of sugar rattled and spilled onto the carpet as he set the coffee down.

Turning away to dig at the crust in the corners of his eyes, Marcus asked, “What time is it?”

“Eleven.”

“You could have woken me up.”

Tomás unwound the scarf from his neck. The black shirt and white collar were in place again, tidy and ever-present.

Marcus pulled the curtains open, letting light wipe away the residue from his dream. “We won’t make it to Bismarck today.”

“We’re not on a schedule,” said Tomás, shaking a packet of sugar back and forth like a Polaroid. The smell of their breakfast blossomed up into the room’s stale air. “Do you like bacon? I realized I didn’t know.” The bag rustled. “There’s a lot I don’t know about you.” Tomás sat on the edge of the bed and a black curl bobbed over his right eyebrow.

“I love bacon,” Marcus said. He took the biscuit sandwich and a fluttering pile of napkins. “Good thing I’m not a former rabbi or imam.”

It was meant to make Tomás laugh, but he shook his head instead. “You’re not a former anything.”

The sandwiches dripped bacon grease and the coffee was weak but blistering hot. Marcus and Tomás winced and laughed and covered their grease-shining lips as they ate. Watching Tomás suck the oil off of his fingertips one by one when he had finished the sandwich made Marcus as lightheaded as he had been on his ordination day, years ago and an ocean away. He had felt the Holy Spirit enter him like a weighty kind of light just as the host wafer had hit his tongue. The wine had been sweet and too scant, just like the fumbling touch of a fellow inductee the night before, his neat hand down Marcus’s trousers. As he drank, he knew he would give his life to God. He had already, long ago, given his heart to men.

Lord, he had often grieved his vows. He felt their absence when Tomás wiped away the sheen from his mouth with the napkin. Behind eyelids closed on reflex, Marcus imagined smearing the grease outside the bounds of Tomás’s full lips with his thumb. Dabbing the fragrant fat in the naked hollow of Tomás’s throat, over the length of his collarbones, on his dark nipples, and licking it away…

Marcus felt warmth spread over his lap and for a single mortifying second thought he had come in his pants like a schoolboy. He looked down to see the styrofoam cup clenched too hard in his fist, split and spilling coffee over his trousers.

Tomás’s eyes were wide.

“Fuck,” Marcus said without thinking.

Tomás flinched.

“It’s all right,” Marcus said. “These jeans are nearly standing up on their own, anyway.” He set the dripping remains of the cup on the bedside table.

“You didn’t burn yourself?” asked Tomás.

Marcus shook his head, his embarrassment manifesting as a weariness, an urge to lie back on the hard mattress until his wet clothes went cold. He resisted.

“Let’s just stay for another day,” Tomás suggested. “Find somewhere to do laundry. My shirts need a wash, too.” He stood up, brushing biscuit crumbs away from his legs, then crammed the empty bag into the trash can beside his bed. “Anyway, we got a little snow. Who knows—maybe the sun will melt it and clear the road for tomorrow. Yes?”

The little rhetorical flourish at the end of the statement—Marcus had to smile. Native English speakers didn’t often use it. He imagined Tomás talking to a parishioner, to his sister. Or, further out of the realm of possibility, entreating Marcus as he fumbled with the clasp of his trousers.

_Sí, sí._

“Do you need the shower?” The tightness in Marcus’s own voice surprised him.

“Go ahead.”

Relief found him when he closed the bathroom door. He peeled off jeans and boxer briefs that clung limpet-strong to his skin. Before shrugging off his shirt, he examined his lower body. Bony feet with arches artificially high from being stuffed into too-small shoes as he grew. Wiry hair on his calves and shins the same no-color as his beard. Pockmarked knees. His skin had not yet forgotten the many hours kneeling on pebbles (God knew rice and salt were too dear to waste) and praying under the brothers’ watchful eyes. Beaten if he so much as shifted his weight to relieve the pain, or else clapped ‘round the head so hard his ear rang for hours.

The scar on his thigh, earned as an adult and as an exorcist, came from a tempest of debris called up by a possessed girl in Corsica. She had waves of black hair down her back and when she was cleansed, she had spat on Marcus over her wailing mother’s shoulder. For making her suffer.

He took a second or two to run fingers over sharp hip bones then pulled off the shirt, as well.

Even with the squealing knob cranked all the way over, the tub ran lukewarm at best. After a moment of waiting in vain for the water to heat up, Marcus twisted the handle to the other side and pushed the button for the shower. Stepping into the spray, he had to bite his lip to stop from shouting. The cold drops made needle points that burned where they touched. His belly contracted on instinct, trying to get the warm center of him away from the assault. Clenching his jaw, Marcus turned and ducked his head under the freezing spray. His pale skin lit up shrimp-pink.

Saint Aemilianus, an obscure one to be sure, was flayed alive as a heretic by the Vandal king in fifth century North Africa. Even after the Nicaean Council and the evangelizing of Constantine, trenches of theology divided the faith in those early days. Easy to be on the wrong side. But martyrdom was the great equalizer, apparently. Aemilianus and his gruesome death are feasted by the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches alike.

Marcus forced himself to uncurl his fingers from his palms so he could unwrap the little bar of soap. The water was ice, then fire, then finally numbness, leaving his skin pebbled and shrunken-feeling. The soap hardly lathered at all; it was hard to tell if it or the water was to blame. Marcus ran slimy fingers over his scalp and face, his armpits, his groin. Water he sucked in between chattering teeth flushed the taste of sleep and coffee from his mouth.

Afterward, he stood in the plastic basin of the tub, arms wrapped tight over his midsection and wincing as returning warmth brought new agony.

The towels on offer were small and rough as a square of sandpaper. Marcus dressed after scrubbing his skin down and studied his face in the mirror. Gaunt as a holy hermit fed on rock crabs or forest fruits. He liked to eat; it was one of his prime earthly pleasures. But his body stayed lean in spite of it, consumed by a familiar parasite. Losing his priest’s armor seemed to have drawn its attention. It lay under his skin and pressed outward, keen to take over his hands and voice, a creature that could not be appeased with spiritual offerings alone. He feared the day it would push all the way through, leaving the former Marcus Keane behind in a heap like the martyr’s bloody skin.

It was easy to pick out other haunted people when you were haunted yourself.

Tomás, on the other hand, seemed to feed on spirit like manna. When the demon had hurt him, Marcus felt a mild shock that the cut on his forehead leaked plain red blood instead of white light.

It was warmer in the main room than in the bathroom. Tomás had changed his clothes and now wore black jeans and a gray shirt. In the shallow _V_ of the neckline, his skin looked indecently bare. “Don’t bother with the free wi-fi,” he told Marcus. “It’s worthless. Anyway, I found a place for laundry. They have soap and a change machine.”

“Resourceful,” Marcus said, looking at Tomás’s phone and not his neck.

A laugh. “Google is resourceful. I think I’m along for the ride, honestly.”

In the closet that reeked of the ghosts of long-departed mothballs was a plastic dry cleaning bag. They bundled their dirty clothes into it and headed out.

A few people looked up when they entered the laundromat, drinking in its heat and dizzy, powdery scent. Some of those here may have been at the bar the night before, but it was hard to tell. Everyone looked haggard and strange under the fluorescents.

Marcus went to buy soap and softener sheets while Tomás emptied their meager wardrobe into a washer. A couple of patrons turned to whisper to one another, unheard over the thrum of the dryers.

The two men sat near to one another in plastic stadium-style chairs, their clothes whispering together when they shifted position.

The heat was welcome but also thick in the lungs. While Tomás put the clothes into a dryer, Marcus went to the vending machine and bought them a can of Coke each. Tomás nodded his silent thanks, pressing the cold metal against his forehead for a moment before popping the tab. Soda misted into the air and drifted down onto his hand.

Marcus closed his eyes. If he ignored the smell and the sound, he could have been sitting on a sunlit bench in the Plaza de las Tres Centurias in Aguascalientes, catching the spray of the dancing fountains. He would have a straw hat on to keep his scalp from burning. The bench’s slats would creak and he would know Tomás had returned from the smell of his sweat mingled with the odor of fresh churros. Across the plaza, a band in colorful suits would be setting up to play: _trompeta, acordeón, guitarra._

When he opened his eyes, though, there was only the laundromat and its patrons in the washed-out light. Tomás nudged him with an elbow, and he rose to help fold. The rivets on his jeans were hot as coals.

They were still in Wisconsin. Outside, the sun sparkled on snow.


	3. Saint Laura of Córdoba

Marcus woke the next morning closer to dawn than noon. His sleep had been deep and free of dreams this time. He put on his jacket and stepped out into crunching frost, cursing under his billowing breath, to get breakfast. The convenience store had fresher stuff than what was on offer in the motel lobby.

Tomás’s hair was mussed when he sat up against the headboard, and Marcus’s heart contracted. The smile he got when handing over two of the four doughnuts was a beatitude.

They were showered and packed and on the road in a half hour, picking up Interstate 94 again and heading northwest over the Minnesota border. The view in all directions was flat and barren, patchworked with fields and studded with huge dairy barns coughing up methane steam. Sheds here and there held the shapes of tractors covered for the winter.

The air whipping by could freeze the balls off a brass monkey. Marcus had heard that gem of a saying on his first-ever trip across the pond, from an Italian man at the corner of Eighteenth and Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. An icy wind had been barreling northeastward from over the bay. Marcus had busted up laughing, breaking any tension between him and the Italian, who served as the handyman for St. Frances Cabrini Church. Marcus had never in his life heard of the eponymous saint. The handyman said she’d come ashore in New York in the eighteen hundreds, with hordes of other Italians fleeing poverty in the home country. She got grudging support for her people from fellow Catholics of another hardscrabble group, the Irish. Good Mother Cabrini had her fingers in a lot of pies, it turned out, and ended up spreading her good works far and wide. She died in Chicago in one of her own hospitals.

Years later, during the Rance ordeal, Marcus would take time to visit her shrine in Lincoln Park, lighting a votive nested in deep red glass. He’d tucked a prayer card into his inner breast pocket, which he later showed to the thing that was eating Casey Rance. The demon had chuckled with the girl’s voice and destroyed the card with a sulfurous blue flame.

In the car, during a staticky gulf between radio station signals, Marcus considered telling the whole story to Tomás. He stayed silent instead, a poor decision. The inside of his head rang empty as the terrain. Not void of words but of _the Word_ , where once communion between him and his God had been full like a mango ready to split.

The radio fizzed. Tomás clicked it off and began to talk, improbably, about football. Not the American kind with pads and tackles but the sport of both their childhoods. Marcus hadn’t followed professional footie for years.

Tomás knew all the World Cup winners, even from before he was born. Brazil ruled all with six wins. England had taken the Cup once, Mexico never.

It was simple “lad talk” of the kind Marcus hadn’t had in a long time. It renewed his sluggish spirit.

Afterward, they talked about cars. Other countries liked American cars much more than did the Americans, with their shiny favorites freighted over from Japan. Tomás told the story of the one time his older cousin let him behind the wheel of his prized sixty-seven Ford Mustang. It rattled, Tomás said, and had springs poking through the seats, but it was blue as an oil slick and fast enough to blow the dust out of its crevices at top speed. He had nearly sheared off the passenger side mirror on a utility pole, making Primo Teodoro yank the emergency brake. Tomás had worn the purple impression of the steering wheel’s stitching on his forehead for more than a week, Sunday services included.

Teodoro had died a few years back and Tomás had been called to officiate his funeral. The old Mustang had been gone a long time by then, swapped for a sedan when Teodoro and his wife had children. He died of a reaction to radiocontrast dye during a spinal X-ray. Thirty-one years old. His widow, a plastics engineer, still emailed Tomás once in a while.

Marcus himself hadn’t learned to drive until he was into his twenties. At St. Thomas More and later at Allen Hall, he could use the Tube on the rare occasions he had to leave the borough. The seminary students could get their hands on anything in Chelsea. Drink and card games and even cocaine, the early-eighties drug of choice.

He had finally mastered driving on pitted roads while on mission in rural Uruguay, the shining promise of Montevideo’s shore hours away.

When they found a signal again, Mick Jagger was singing “Beast of Burden.” Poor Tomás made the grave mistake of claiming the Beatles were better than the Stones. Marcus explained that the Stones’ epic run between _Their Satanic Majesties Request…_ in sixty-seven and _Exile on Main Street_ in seventy-two beat the hell out of the Beatles’ sixty-six to sixty-nine arc. Sure, the Beatles had _Revolver_ and _Abbey Road,_  but also duds like _Yellow Submarine_ and _Magical Mystery Tour_.

“The earlier songs are better,” Tomás finally concluded, careful to watch the road, his hands at ten and two on the wheel like a driving instructor.

Marcus scoffed. “All that, ‘She loves you yeah yeah yeah’ shite? It’s pap.”

“You’re English.”

“The Rolling Stones are English, too.”

“Look at _Help!_ though,” Tomás countered. “Every song is a hit. You hear one and you need to sing along.” He smiled. “It’s primal.”

Marcus rolled his eyes and flung himself back against his seat. “Come _on_ , man! ‘Brown Sugar’ is primal. ‘Gimme Shelter’ is primal. Lennon and McCartney wouldn’t know _primal_ if it bit them in the arse.”

“I only meant the urge to sing. They’re catchy.”

“Catchy?”

Tomás laughed and whacked the steering wheel, unwilling to back down. “Catchy.”

“Their solo stuff is better,” said Marcus. “Some of it. Wings was awful.”

“‘My Sweet Lord,’” Tomás said. “George Harrison. I love that one.”

Marcus’s laugh rang through the car. “You would.” He poked Tomás in the bicep with his forefinger. “‘Imagine.’ John Lennon.”

“No way.”

“Sure,” Marcus said.

“Imagine no heaven? No religion?” It was difficult to tell if Tomás was teasing. “The Church might not approve.”

“Oh, it’s _very_ catholic,” Marcus said. “Lowercase ‘c.’”

“I don’t understand,” said Tomás.

“That’s all right, my friend,” said Marcus, patting his shoulder. “That’s all right.”

 

**

 

Early fall twilight caught up with them, settling over the place on the western horizon where Bismarck would soon rise up. They stopped east of the city in a town called McKenzie. Dinner was at O’Flanagans, a strip mall “pub” that was just about as Irish as its menu. Phil Collins played in the grease-smelling interior: “You’ll Be In My Heart.”

Tomás devoured a burger that ran with red juices and barbecue sauce. Marcus had the fish and chips. The malt vinegar came in white plastic packets like antiseptic wipes and the breading was soggy, but he was hungry enough to finish most of it off.

By the end of the meal, he felt like the temperature in the restaurant had gone up. In the car, the heat began to prickle, starting at Marcus’s scalp and moving downward until he squirmed. It felt like sitting too close to a fire. Good God, it _was_ the fifth of November, wasn’t it? Across the ocean, straw-stuffed effigies were probably still blazing. In North Dakota it was just another night.

 Marcus’s finger shook as he moved to push the window button. It helped a little, but the cold air still felt thick as swimming pool water against his puffy face. The road ahead went fuzzy.

Tomás pulled the car to a crackling halt on the snowbound shoulder of the road. “Marcus, are you feeling okay?”

Marcus tried a smile. Sitting up in his seat made his stomach ripple with nausea and another feverish wave roll across his skin. Every hair follicle pricked with pain and his clothes chafed. “Just a bit peaky is all,” he said. “I could use a lie down.”

Frowning, Tomás studied him for another few seconds before putting the car in gear again. “I’ll find a motel.”

The word “Vacancy” was a blue curl of neon tubing under the sign for the Lake View Inn. Across the road was a pond-sized thing ringed with barbed wire and eaten away by overgrowth. The “lake,” one had to assume. Yellow sodium bulbs spotted the motel walkways, showing powder blue paint on wooden siding and a darker blue for the doors.

Marcus’s shirtfront was nearly soaked and he could feel trickles of sweat winding down his knobby spine. When he stood up, his stomach heaved and his gorge rose, forcing him to swallow back sour bile.

Tomás unwound his scarf, showing his collar, as they limped into the lobby vestibule. A balding man in a blue polo shirt stood behind the counter.

Marcus’s reflection in an out-of-order vending machine was wavery and gray, his eyes sunken.

“A double room, please,” Tomás told the desk attendant, who kept looking over to where Marcus propped himself up by the wall. The smell of the potpourri in an open bowl atop the desk was an assault; the whir and clunk of a laser printer seemed far too loud.

“You’re all set,” the desk attendant said. “One twenty-one is directly behind this building, first level.”

Marcus opened his eyes.

“Maybe you should check into a hospital instead, buddy,” the man said to Marcus. “No offense, but you’re not looking too good.”

_I’m fine,_ Marcus tried to say, getting nothing but a wet noise in the back of his throat.

“He’s fine,” said Tomás.

The cold nighttime world pitched and yawed as they made their way to the room, Marcus’s arm flung over Tomás’s shoulder. After the beep-and-click of the key card, Marcus could smell old carpet and ammonia. He shoved his way inside and stumbled into the dark bathroom with only enough time to raise the seat before emptying his guts into the toilet.

Tomás rushed in. “You’re really not well.”

Marcus spat and pushed the flush lever. “No shit.” He fought back another gag. “Fish. Must’ve been off.”

“Do you need a doctor?”

“Won’t do anything,” he managed. “Just...has to pass.”

When Tomás knelt and pressed his hand to Marcus’s back, Marcus could feel the slimy coldness of his wet shirt. He squeezed his eyes shut.

“What can I do?” asked Tomás.

Marcus scowled. “Hold my hair?”

Tomás tutted and massaged his neck. “Stop talking.”

Another wave of nausea hit, and Marcus was helpless against it. It seemed like the two of them were there for hours, he in a shaky pile beside the bowl and Tomás perched on the edge of the bathtub, saying _It’s okay_ over and over. He wet down a washcloth in the tap and swabbed away the sweat from Marcus’s brow.

Marcus tried to drink, but he brought the water right back up more times than he could count. Welts rose on his arms where he scratched, unaware, trying to dig out the fizzing pain. Everything was dry and burning.

The Andalusian abbess Santa Laura had suffered a terrible martyrdom under the Caliphate: scalded to death with burning pitch. Marcus clung to her suffering within his own. He remembered Casey’s runaway fever, bubbling through her skin, wounding his palm. _I am dying_ , he thought in her voice.

_Am I dying?_

He must have asked it aloud.

“No, no,” Tomás said. He patted Marcus’s back and quietly invoked Saint Benedict and the Holy Mother.

Sometime in the night, Marcus was finally able to take small sips from the plastic cup. The thirst was terrible, but he forced himself to go slowly.

_Our Lord in the desert. Vision in a lion’s shape._

A little later he could stand up and rinse his chin and neck. The overhead light in the room seared his eyes; Tomás turned it off and helped pull off the wringing wet shirt. Marcus lowered himself like a burn victim onto the creaking bed. To his surprise, Tomás joined him, sitting cross-legged and pulling a pillow into his lap for Marcus to lay on. They were silent for a long time, Marcus breathing heavily through his arid mouth and Tomás wetting it now and then from the wobbling cup.

Tomás prayed the Rosary, pressing his lips to each bead and the crucifix into Marcus’s forehead. The cinnabar was warm.

Marcus clutched at the familiar shape. He had not owned a string of Rosary beads himself in many years.

“ _When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me,”_ Tomás sang softly, his fingertips on Marcus’s temple. “ _Speaking words of wisdom: Let it be._ ”

Marcus coughed, the spasm painful in his belly. “Don’t you dare,” he rasped.

“ _And in my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me, speaking words of wisdom: Let it be._ ”

A pleasant, tuneful voice. It must have had the young girls (and many boys) swooning in the aisles during Mass. Marcus would have liked to have seen it—Tomás in his embroidered robes giving Communion to the faithful and the doubting alike.

The plastic cup was his chalice now, the water cool and metallic.

“ _Let it be, let it be. Let it be, let it be. Whisper words of wisdom: Let it be._ ”

Marcus let the empty cup fall from his hand. “I thought you only liked the early stuff,” he said. It was a whisper.

Tomás hushed him. “Close your eyes,” he said. “Rest.”


	4. Saint Christina of Persia

Morning brought a headache and disorientation. Patchy curtains leaked fuzzy daylight from the window over the heating unit. Their room could have been underwater, or on the moon, for all Marcus knew.

He coughed once and threw the covers back, lurching out of bed. In the bathroom, he stood for long minutes bent over the sink, bringing the mineral-heavy water to his mouth with cupped hands. His stomach felt distended when he was able to make himself stop.

Tomás stood with one hand on the doorframe, watching.

Marcus’s voice was the creak of a disused hinge. “Thirsty.”

“Were you sick again?” Tomás asked.

Marcus shook his head and stood upright. He avoided looking at his reflection, which he knew was pale as fog, his face splintered with deep lines. It was a specter he recognized. Weariness bound up into the shape of a man.

Tomás thumped the heel of his hand twice, lightly, against the doorframe. “What happened to you?”

At that, Marcus turned. His heart began to thump in his ears. “Food poisoning. It’s over. I’m fine.”

“Don’t play dumb.” Tomás shook his head. “You know what I’m talking about.”

Marcus only sniffed and pushed past him into the bedroom. He was shaking, nerves jumping, as he pulled a shirt from his bag.

Tomás took one long step forward and yanked it out of his hand.

“Would you rather I froze?” Marcus asked.

“I’d rather you were honest with me. The scars. On your back. I’m asking you what happened.”

Marcus scowled. “I suppose you think I did it myself.”

Tomás cocked his head to the side. “Did you?”

He advanced on Tomás, getting in his face. It was enough to allow him to snatch the shirt back. “Of fucking course not.” Teeth clenched together so hard his jaw ached, Marcus turned toward the window and pulled on the shirt, stretched out from their tug of war. “I’m not a fanatic.” When Tomás touched his shoulder, he shrugged him off too violently.

“Was it a demon?” asked Tomás.

With a heavy sigh, Marcus said, “No. It wasn’t a demon.”

“Were you imprisoned?” Tomás lowered his voice. “You can talk to me, Marcus. You don’t have to hold onto this pain.”

Marcus whirled and leveled a finger at Tomás’s face. “Listen. If you want to hear about persecution, find someone else. Go read Butler if you want lurid stories. But I’m not playing this game. There’s nothing noble about suffering.”

“The Savior suffered,” Tomás said. His tone was so assured that it was almost self-righteous. “Was He not noble?”

“Yes, well, I’m not Christ,” Marcus hissed. “And _you’re_ not my confessor.”

On instinct, Tomás reached out, but drew his hand back when Marcus fixed him with a furious look. “No,” Tomás said, backing off. “I’m your friend. I only want to help.”

“You want to help? Stop asking questions.” Marcus pulled on his jacket, facing toward the door. Behind him, he heard Tomás take a breath as if preparing to speak. But no words followed Marcus out the door.

 

**

 

The silence in the car was thick and sodden as they drove. Through Bismarck and over into Montana. Again that strange emptiness in Marcus’s head, like the great bowl of an abandoned satellite dish, knocking his thoughts around. Now without the distraction of idle banter.

It had been a very long time since he had told anyone the story behind the overlapping scars that marred his back from neck to buttock. Both who had heard it from him were dead now. The minister, not Catholic but Church of England, who had bought a teenage Marcus his train ticket to London with money straight from the coffers. He had been ancient then, a plot already marked off in his churchyard for the day he rose to glory.

And then the young mother in Peru, before Marcus got his dispensation from the Vatican to give the rites of exorcism. She claimed to be injured by demonic spirits. It was nothing otherworldly in the end—just her shitstain of a husband. He had hit her so hard in the face that the spinal ligaments had partly come loose from the base of her skull. Just a tap could dislodge them and kill her. Lying on a cot in the clinic, she was too frightened for last rites. Marcus prayed with her until she slept and then said the Viaticum quietly over her. She returned home to cook rice and eggs for her three-year-old daughter the next day. By that evening she was dead.

The husband did not attend her funeral on account of being at the bottom of a cliff. The same village doctor who treated his wife said he might have lain there dying on the rocks for more than a day.

No one saw Marcus push him from the edge. Or, if they did, they kept their silence.

That afternoon, Marcus and Tomás stopped in Forsyth, where State Route Eighty-seven forked off toward Great Falls. The temperature had dropped further. A low, grayish sky spat lazy flakes of the same shade.

The restaurant in which they ate looked like someone’s house, with dining tables in the carpeted living room and even in the hall. A sign in the window read, “Home Cookin’ Like Your Ma Makes!” The mashed potatoes were clearly from a box, but there was a stew with carrots and hamburger that made up for it.

Baring his collar once again, Tomás asked their server if there was a nearby church where they could pray.

The closest was St. Hildegard, a series of low buildings painted brown, the church proper topped with a simple cross. Inside, rows of pine pews led to the altar and pulpit crafted of the same wood. A small statue of the Blessed Virgin in black robes stood to the right of the altar.

It was the Apostle Peter, not Hildegard, who looked down from the stained glass window as Marcus touched the water in the font and genuflected. An old habit, though not a requirement now.

After him, Tomás did the same.

A lay clerk in a worn-out sweater came out of a door in the left-hand apse wall. “Welcome to Saint Hildegard,” he called, hitching up falling trousers. “Where are you gentlemen visiting from?”

Tomás pulled his scarf away. “Chicago,” he said. “I’m Father Ortega, and this is Father Keane.”

“Well, what an honor!” the man said as he searched Marcus for signs of his office. “This certainly isn’t your big-city church, but make yourselves at home. I’m Bill.” He watched them drape their coats over a pew. “I can call up Father Crewse if you want.”

“No,” said Tomás. “Thank you, Bill. We are only here to pray.”

Bill smiled with stained teeth. He was removing a pack of cigarettes from his pocket—American Spirit brand, Marcus saw; awful, tasteless things. “Stay as long as you like.”

Marcus took a seat on the right front pew, resting his elbows on his thighs. Tomás knelt before the statue of the Virgin, closing his eyes immediately and muttering the _Ave Maria_ —not in Latin but in Spanish.

Watching carefully, Marcus noted the shapes Tomás’s lips made around the unfamiliar syllables.

 

_Santa Maria, Madre de Dios,_

_Ruega por nosotros pecadores,_

_Ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte._

 

Marcus looked up at the low ceiling, inlaid not with frescoes but with plastic panels over buzzing fluorescent lights. The little church had to have been a recent build. Saint Hildegard was not beatified until 2012. An oversight, Marcus thought, but then again she had been a naturalist as well as a nun, filling books with her observations. She would have been at home on the _Beagle_.

The Church preferred to emphasize her music and ecstatic visions. Hildegard was patron saint of nothing as far as Marcus knew. Musicians already had their Saint Cecilia, the mad could call on Dymphna or Christina Mirabilis.

The Orthodox Church had its own Saint Christina, from Persia. Marcus liked her better. No showy miracles or epileptic ardor. They say she was flogged to death with a lead-tipped scourge. Centuries later, Greek and Russian monks would paint her icons in carmine and gold.

_Now and at the hour of our death._

Marcus looked down to see Tomás staring up at him.

 

**

 

“Why didn’t you want to pray today, earlier, at the church?” Tomás asked him at the door of their room in the Gibson Motor Hotel. They had nearly made the city of Great Falls, but the snow was coming down in clumps and the road had yet to be plowed or salted.

“I’m used to a conversation,” Marcus said, “not a monologue.” He knocked snow from his boots at the stoop then dropped his jacket on the mauve-quilted bed. Above each headboard was the exact same floral print, trapped behind greasy plastic.

Tomás frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to.”

For a minute or two, Tomás was silent, taking off his scarf and coat and throwing them down. Then he turned. “Are you determined to push me away?”

Marcus sighed. His head felt heavy on his neck. “Go to bed, Tomás.”

“I’m not the enemy, Marcus,” Tomás said. “I won’t use what you say against you.”

“Didn’t think you would.”

“Then why are you hiding from me?”

Heat boiled suddenly in Marcus’s chest. “Because it doesn’t matter! Everyone who hurt me is dead. And hopefully roasting merrily in Hell where they belong. If you think I’m one to sit around wailing and moaning over my past, you don’t know me very well at all.”

“Right!” Tomás said, cutting in. “I don’t. But I’m _trying_ to.”  

“You know everything you need to.”

“Bull _shit_ ,” Tomás spat.

Marcus looked up, surprised.

“In Chicago, you told me I was too open,” Tomás said. “And you were right. My mind was like a door and the demon got in. It took all my pain and my shame and it used them against me. The most horrible things that I have ever done or felt—it made them worse. I thought I would go crazy. And I couldn’t understand how you stayed so strong though all of it. But I understand now, Marcus. The demon didn’t have to do anything. Because no one in Hell or on earth could torture you more than you torture yourself!”

An echoing cavern had opened up in Marcus’s chest as he listened. He struggled to keep his voice level. “Well, since you have me figured out so well, there’s not much to say.” The words bounced back, empty of meaning, from that pit inside.

Tomás sank down to sit at the edge of one of the beds, his hands clasped. “Don’t push me away. Get angry with me, tell me I’m weak. But don’t shut me out, Marcus. Please.”

“I’m trying to spare you, you stupid boy.” Marcus tapped two fingers hard against his own skull. “What’s in here, it’s a distraction. You don’t have to see everything I have to be a good exorcist. A good priest. In fact, I pray to God you _don’t_ have to see it.”

“I only see what it does to you,” said Tomás. He went to his knees. “Pray with me. We can ask God together to relieve you of this burden.”

“What the hell makes you think I want it taken away?” Marcus bent down toward Tomás, fuming. “The little boy in Mexico. I will have his face burned into my mind forever. And Jason before him and Kristiana before _him_. On and on. They don’t all turn out like Casey. But if I don’t keep reminding myself that I did all I could, fought to the edge of my sanity and beyond, I won’t be able to do this. Forgetting is poison.” He stopped when Tomás’s hand shot out and caught his wrist, shockingly strong.

“Then you are sick with it. You give all you have to the innocents you try to save and leave nothing for yourself.”

He wrenched his hand away. “Because I was never innocent! Why should my life matter more than theirs?”

“Because you are a child of God, Marcus. He does not abandon those who give their lives to Him.”

At that moment, all of the fury drained from Marcus, leaving him weary and dizzy. He sat on the bed opposite Tomás, head in his hands. “I abandoned Him before I gave my life to the Church. He wasn’t there when I needed Him most.”

Tomás placed his hands on Marcus’s bony knees. “He saw you in your suffering and knew that you would stray. And He called you back, to do this great work.”

“I don’t hear His voice anymore,” Marcus said. “My head, it’s quiet again. After so long. But I almost welcome it.” His eyes stung but he blinked back the onset of tears, furious. “And that is terrifying.”

“Paul tells us ‘Faith comes from hearing,’” Tomás said. “But it was the Savior himself who said, ‘Whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.’ I’m begging you, just pray with me, Marcus. You will hear Him again.”

Marcus winced and looked away. Tomás was so luminous in his perfect assurance. And underneath that ran a richer current: his need not only to share Marcus’s agony but to make it his own. It was so nakedly Christlike it struck Marcus dumb. He tried to be angry or envious, but failed. In that moment, he wanted Tomás more than he had ever desired anything in his life. And it was even more horrifying than apostasy. He got to his feet and lurched toward the door. By the time he realized he had forgotten his jacket, the motel had disappeared behind him in blinding white.


	5. Saint Marcus of Rome

It was so silent, so calm, with every edge softened. The hard line between earth and sky now wavered in swirls and eddies. Clusters of flakes were so buoyant that they bounced off and tumbled away unbroken to the rising ground.

Walking inside the storm, Marcus had looked backward once or twice but kept himself oriented in the approximate direction he remembered the road to be.

The drifts looked so fragile, but they had begun to pack a couple of inches down and he walked as if he was in knee-deep in water, driving from the hip just to move. Though his bare head still burned hot, he knew after a minute or so that the cold would travel upward from his feet where they slapped the hard ground. Freezing wetness had already begun to creep in over the tops of his chukkas, ringing his ankles in bracelets of ice.

Tomás had only called after him twice. Or maybe it had been more and the sound had gotten lost in the muffling snowfall. Somewhere behind he could hear the flat monotone of a car alarm like Morse Code dashes. His dragging footsteps mimicked it.

It was more than a month until the birthday of Jesus Christ. Most people knew the date had been chosen because it was close to the solstice celebration and could offer pagan converts something familiar to cling to. No one _actually_ knew when Jesus had been born, whether the stories of stars and kings and caravans were true.

Wenceslaus of Bohemia, somewhere along the line, became Good King Wenceslas and a tune for Christmastime. The king was long dead, made a saint for his many good works. Marcus shook his head. There were as many saints as snowflakes; they all swirled together after a while.

The real Wenceslaus had done many good works, but the song told the story of his trek through a winter storm to bring gifts to a poor family. Of course he dragged along his faithful page, who later spoke of the miraculous warmth seeping from the king’s footprints. Like following a trace of summer that had lost its way.

No page _or_ saint had followed a twelve-year-old Marcus Keane on his journey in the snow decades before. He’d had only too-small clothes, shoes that pinched, and raging determination that had kept him going while the wet cold crawled up his limbs. It was January of the brand new year nineteen seventy-seven, on the day Catholics celebrated the Baptism. January in the Holy Land was no doubt very different from the same month in Leicestershire.

Marcus, painfully thin and with a rotten tooth in the back of his mouth that throbbed in time with his heart, had chosen the day because of the storm. No one would want to put on boots and coats or haul Charles the mastiff out of his hut to go tramping all over the countryside. The boy had been underfed but was still young and much quicker on his feet than the beer-bellied monks. That, at least, was what he had hoped when he’d jumped out of the open window at the orphanage and into the new snow.

He had started out running, going until his lungs and legs burned. And then he’d run some more. Past Saint Phillip and Saint James Church, because everyone knew that if you sought refuge there the rector would put you in his Vauxhall and take you right back. Everyone knew this because Oliver Hampstead had done it the year before. None of this came directly from Oliver. The boys closest to the windows saw the rector drag him out of the boxy brown car and hand him off to Brother Patrick. Then no one saw him for a couple of days. When Oliver came back it was at supper. His head was shaved and his ear was torn a little, probably from being tugged. As far as Marcus could remember, the boy had never spoken a word again.

Even though by the time he had passed the church he’d been running on what felt like stumps of ice, Marcus swore that would never happen to him. He had stopped praying the hours every day because no one listened. On that day, though, he’d broken down and called to God. Somehow, it worked. He’d only fallen once—on hands and knees, but with grass underneath him instead of bitumen. His only wound had been a scab on his back opening up and bleeding anew.

In Leicester city, a volunteer was shoveling the walk in front of Holy Cross when Marcus limped by.

“You looked like something out of Dickens,” the man, Andrew Pelham, would tell Marcus much, much later, when he was Father Keane and was attending at Pelham’s deathbed. Marcus would laugh and kiss the crepey skin of Pelham’s hand, then excuse himself to weep in the toilets.

Pelham had taken him inside the church offices, wrapped him in a heavy chasuble and put his feet into a bucket of tepid water. It had burned like hot coals but Marcus had gotten a lot of practice learning not to scream. There had been no ride back, no hand-over to Brother Patrick or Brother Edgar. Thus began the salvation of Marcus Keane and the making of a priest.

Now unmade a priest again, he stumbled through the snow. His shoes were soaked and every step was boggy. The storm came out of the night in all directions, white from black. There was a bonfire in his lungs, somehow fed by the frozen wind. The stitch in his side made breathing hard.

Marcus knew he was on a road because of the way either side of his path sloped off into a snow-clotted ditch, but that was all. Soon he would lose his footing. His were not a young man’s bones anymore. Stupid, stupid to have run away from something warm and good, even if it suffocated him.

He had been named for a saint, of course. Saint Marcus and Saint Marcellianus were two early martyrs. They had secret Christian lives with secret Christian families. When Diocletian swept down, their frantic parents begged them to lie. To say they accepted the gods again.

But a martyr goes toward pain like a boy runs away from it. The brothers were bound to pillars, nailed through the feet like Christ was. Maybe they called for the mercy of death, maybe they didn’t. Roman soldiers ran them through with their lances the next day, and made orphans and widows in the name of God.

In the flat snowscape of Montana, seventeen hundred years later, Marcus Keane stopped in the middle of a drift and clutched his side with numb fingers. The night was quiet and his head was quiet, but up ahead he saw light. Possibly a trick of the mind. The glow was orange and perfectly round. Snowflakes made shadows falling through it. It might as well have been a streetlamp in Guanajuato City, with the dark shapes of moths tapping against the bulb. Marcus laughed, then twisted into the pain. He stumped forward. The light flickered.

This time, when he fell forward, it was cold asphalt below.

 

**

 

Someone was dabbing something slick on his lips and he felt very, very warm. Marcus opened his eyes. He lay in a room flooded with blue light from all directions. Above him was the dark, round face of a young woman—pretty, with a white wimple tucked behind small ears.

“Good morning,” she said in an accent he didn’t recognize. Her forefinger shone with the ointment she’d put on his lips.

“Hot,” he said.

The young nun folded the wool blanket down to waist-level and Marcus breathed his relief.

There was a sudden pressure on his wrist, cool and dry. When he turned his head, Tomás smiled at him. He had done it so many times before. But this smile stripped Marcus raw. He wrestled his right arm from underneath the stiff, white sheet to cover his face as the tears flooded out.

“Marcus,” said Tomás. “You’re all right.”

The nun had walked away, but she returned with a dry cloth and patted away the wetness on his cheeks and in his ears. She offered Marcus the cloth and he took it with gratitude, wiping his running nose. He examined his hand, which was spotty with chilblains but otherwise unscathed.

“How did you find me?” he asked Tomás.

“I didn’t. They did.” Tomás nodded toward the nun, who smiled again.

“When Father Ortega told us where you came from,” she said, “I couldn’t believe it. You walked almost four miles.” She patted his forearm, her nails cut short in pink nail beds. “You are lucky to be alive. God is good.”

“Where are we?” Marcus asked.

“The monastery of the Poor Clares,” said the nun. “I am Sister Kobina.”

“You’re not from Montana,” Marcus said, earning a ringing laugh from Kobina.

“Neither are you,” she countered. “I grew up and came to the Sisterhood in Ghana. Here we are, three refugees brought together in Christ.”

“Refugees,” Marcus repeated.

“Would you like something to eat?” Kobina asked.

“You should eat,” Tomás told him.

Kobina nodded. “I will bring soup. It’s very good.”

When she had left the room, Marcus looked past Tomás’s shoulder to the window, which looked out onto a flat, snowy expanse bounded by wooden fences. They sky was mostly cloudy, but the occasional peek of brilliant blue slipped through. “I suppose now is when you’ll ask me what I was thinking,” Marcus said.

Tomás held Marcus’s hand between his palms. “No. I’m just glad you’re okay.”

Marcus sniffed and looked up at the ceiling. “Good God, boy. Don’t you ever just get angry? I behaved like an idiot.”

“I _was_ angry,” Tomás said. “Part of me still is. I was frightened for you, Marcus. Terrified. I took the car and went after you. Looking for hours, praying and begging for a sign. When I came here and I saw you wrapped up in blankets with your lips blue, I wanted to shake you. Hit you. Scream at you and tell you how you had made me suffer. But I got on my knees here beside your bed and I cried and I thanked God instead. I don’t want to do this without you.”

Marcus shut his eyes. “What is ‘this?’ What are we doing?”

Tomás hesitated before he spoke. Marcus was expecting him to say something grand and righteous, but he was surprised.

“Just making our way,” said Tomás. “Helping where we can. We are men, broken and born in sin, but we must _try_.”

“I’m tired, Tomás. So very tired.”

“But you won’t give up. I’m sure of it. You have been hurt worse than this and you are still alive.”

Shaking his head, Marcus said, “I can’t see the path anymore. It’s like last night. All rubbed out. Blank. Gone.”

Tomás leaned in. “Listen to me. You could not have saved Casey or Angela if the Lord had forsaken you. You couldn’t have survived, then or now. God has a plan for you. I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”

In his mind, Marcus again saw the swirling snow, raising up hills in a flat land. Now he turned back to Tomás, searching his face. “I saw my mother die. Not in a hospital bed receiving the Eucharist, but in our kitchen. In her own blood.”

“I know.” Tomás squeezed his hand.

“I know you do. But I want to tell it. You would never think a person had so much blood in them, Tomás. Oceans of it. And my father, too. When I shot him, he tried to talk. Then he was quiet, just bleeding. So long I thought his heart would never stop. They gave me to my dead father’s sister. She had me for three nights before she handed me over to the brothers at Saint Stephen’s. Just outside the appropriately named town of Ratby. There were rats there. Lice, too. They cut our hair and burned our blankets because of it.”

“You don’t have to do this now,” Tomás told him. “You can wait until you’re stronger.”

Marcus smiled, though it was hard to coerce the muscles to obey. “I won’t ever be stronger. There were about a hundred and fifty or so of us. Boys, that is. We were meant to have shelter, education, prayer. There was a lot of the latter. Our “schooling” was sewing together socks for five hours a day. Free labor for the woollen mills nearby, though they’re all shut by now. I’ll never forget the _tick-tick-tick_ sound of the machines in that huge room. Windows open year-round. There’d be a fight over the seats closest to the fire in winter. The ones closest to the window in summer. If the wind was right you could catch the smell of baking bread from over Leicester. For a year, I smelled bread more than I ate it. We said Lauds at dawn, Vespers in the evening. No bed until after Matins at midnight. God help anyone who shirked.”

“They beat you,” said Tomás.

“The lucky ones,” Marcus said. “The older boys and the ugly ones—lanky or spotty like myself. Birch was free and plentiful from the grounds. Good for the brothers, too, because it hurt like hellfire, and they could do as much or as little damage as they wanted.” He paused. “The prettier boys, the ones with the good skin and hair, they got it far less often. I was jealous until I understood. They had it so much worse, Tomás. _So_ much worse. I’m thankful I got away with only this.”

Tomás crossed himself. His eyes were very bright. As Marcus watched, a tear fell down his cheek and into the day’s growth of beard on his chin.

Marcus had to look away. “I was there for a year and two months. It was more than enough. Then I ran. That place was Hell and the brothers its agents, or so I thought.”

“Why did you…?” Tomás started.

“Become a priest?”

Tomás nodded.

“I stumbled on it, much like I stumbled on this place. Someone showed me men of faith could be kind. Showed me that I had agency, a choice. I saw that Christ was wounded as I was wounded. I could look at His face and see, ‘Yes, You understand.’” Marcus clutched Tomás’s hand. “In this world, Tomás, we must protect the innocent above anything else. Anything.”


	6. Saint Thomas (Aquinas)

Marcus and Tomás left the infirmary of the Poor Clares a day and a half after the snowstorm. They left Great Falls the day after that, choosing to pick up the interstate again south to Butte and then west to the Washington border. On a ridge, Spokane rolled out before them as sunset bruised the sky over the valley. The air was much wetter now. Tomás pumped gas in Liberty Lake and guided the car toward a place that had tiny cabins instead of contiguous rooms. The old-fashioned brass key was attached to a keychain of a blue plastic dolphin. Moss grew around the cabin’s foundations.

The blistered spots had all but disappeared from Marcus’s hands and feet. He’d had to get new boots after the nuns had thrown away the old ones. These were waterproof and rose above ankle height. Even though they were a pain to unlace, he was grateful.

He had just kicked them off with a sigh, placing his sock-clad feet on the carpet beside the bed, when he noticed Tomás looking at him. “Dinner?” he asked.

Tomás shook his head. “Not yet.”

Marcus pulled off his socks, but Tomás still stared. “What is it?”

“Can I ask you to do something for me?” Tomás asked.

“Maybe.”

Tomás appeared to dither for a moment, wringing his hands like someone nervous about speaking in public. Then he said, “I want you to hear my confession.”

Marcus sighed and shook his head, both relieved and disappointed. “I don’t do that anymore. I haven’t in a very long time.”

“Please.” Tomás went over and took his hand.

He didn’t pull it away, but said, “I’m sure there’s a church in town. Someone will hear you.”

“I don’t want _someone,_ ” Tomás told him. “I want _you_. It has to be you.” He knelt at Marcus’s feet. “Please.”

Again, that earnestness so wrenching in its sincerity. Through the window, the sunset touched the planes of Tomás’s face. He seemed to absorb it into his skin and push it outward again.

Marcus found it hard to breathe, but he laid his free hand on Tomás’s head, an implicit agreement.

Tomás’s gratitude was radiant. He let go of Marcus’s hand and made the sign of the Cross. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” he said, “my last confession was two months ago.”

Marcus nodded, any words stoppered in his throat.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” Tomás began, “I have committed the sin of pride. I have been...tempted to think that it was me and not the Lord who drove the demon away from the Rance family. I know that I am His humble instrument, and all power is in Him. Sometimes...it’s hard to remember.” A breath. “And...I have put myself before others. When it got very hard, I wanted to give up, go back to my parish, my old life. I wanted to deny His plan for me.”

Tomás was trembling under Marcus’s touch. His voice shook.

Something squeezed tight inside Marcus’s chest.

Tomás went on. “I thought when the demon took Angela Rance that she could only find freedom in death. And, God help me, I thought of releasing her.”

“Tomás,” Marcus said, soft and low, “this is not sin. I’ve thought the same things, over and over.”

“ _Please_ ,” said Tomás, his voice strained. He bowed his head. “I have broken the vows of my holy office. I—I desired someone. A woman. Desire is sin enough, so said Jesus. But I acted on it. I went to her.”

Marcus grasped Tomás’s shuddering shoulders. “I know all this.” Wanting to put him at ease, he added, “ _God_ knows this, because He knows your heart.”

But when Tomás raised his head, there was horror in his expression instead of relief. “If He knows my heart I am damned.” Tears spilled through his lashes.

Taking the tear-stained face between his hands, Marcus said, “You are not damned. You are chosen. Listen to Saint Paul. ‘Neglect not the gift that is in thee, which was given thee by prophecy.” He smudged the wetness away with his thumbs. “‘Take heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine; continue in them: for in doing this, _thou shalt both save thyself_ , and them that hear thee.”

Marcus bent and kissed Tomás’s brow, then in the same spot he inscribed a cross with his thumb. “ _Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris…_ ”

He got no further than “the Father” because Tomás had brought their mouths together. His tears slid down and warmed both their faces.

Marcus gasped and flinched back.

Tomás’s eyes were wide; he backed away and got clumsily to his feet. “I’m sorry.” It was a whimper. “What have I done?”  He raked the nails of one hand down the side of his face.

To prevent him from doing more damage, Marcus leapt off the bed and grabbed Tomás hard by the biceps, fingers pushing the cloth of his shirt into his skin.

Tomás tried to shrug away, but Marcus gathered a handful of his shirtfront with one hand. The other he curled at the base of Tomás’s skull, pulling him close. “Stop,” he whispered, their lips near touching, their unshaven cheeks rasping. “Stop.” A kiss, soft on a mouth that had yet to respond in kind.

Tomás sighed and let go of the panicked tension in his body, leaning in.

To Marcus, his mouth tasted like tears. He smelled like the green core of a branch pruned for spring.

_As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste._

_The Song of Solomon_.

Tommaso D’Aquino, the great celibate come down from Montecassino, taught his last lesson in 1274 on it, and died as he preached. How human, how absurd.

Tomás gripped handfuls of Marcus’s shirt as if one of them was about to topple over a ledge. Far too late: they were already over and falling.

Marcus threaded his fingers into Tomás’s dark hair and pulled his head gently to one side so he could suck at the skin of his neck. Tomás reached for the collar, to pull it off, but Marcus stayed his hand and said, “No. Leave it on.” He sank down to the carpet hard enough to make his knees crack, but he shrugged the pain away and went for Tomás’s belt. The leather creaked and the fittings rattled. Marcus made short work of the buttons and zipper then pushed the immaculate black trousers down Tomás’s legs.

Tomás clung to him, cradling the back of Marcus’s head and stroking his face.

Marcus turned and closed his lips briefly around Tomás’s thumb, licking the soft pad. He pressed his nose against the fabric of the briefs. Tomás was half-hard already. The dark and sourish smell was familiar even though he hadn’t been this close to it in decades. It made his mouth water.

Tomás let him tug down the briefs, anticipation cutting off a sigh.

The noise he made when Marcus took him in his mouth almost sounded like suffering. He hardened quickly, laying heavy on Marcus’s tongue and stretching the corners of his mouth.

Tomás rubbed his fingertips over and over through Marcus’s close-cropped hair.

Marcus encouraged him to push into his mouth, drag the thick and salty taste across his tongue to the back of his throat.

There was a high-pitched note at the front of Tomás’s sigh; he was breathing quickly, nearing the edge.

Marcus encircled the base of his cock with his fingers. He could tell Tomás was trying to hold back the sounds he made. Neatly clipped fingernails grazed the back of Marcus’s head and he heard Tomás whisper, “ _Voy a venir…_ ”

Marcus could guess at his meaning. All at once, thick fluid spilled into his throat. He swallowed, neat and reflexive. Above him, Tomás let his jaw go slack, freeing the knuckles he had jammed against his teeth to keep from crying out. Marcus felt a hand stroking his face and touched it gently, staying as he was until Tomás began to go soft in his mouth. Then he helped him to sit on the edge of the bed and pulled his trousers and briefs free, tossing them in a heap over by the door.  

Marcus sat beside him on the bed and traced the prickly line of his jaw. He leaned in to press their lips together again. Knowing that Tomás could taste himself on Marcus’s tongue was so erotic it was dizzying. He went for the buttons on his shirt, but Marcus stopped him again. “Let me.” He hooked the stiff, white collar and pulled it free. His fingers, trembling in their eagerness, fumbled at tightly sewn buttons.

Tomás reached over and placed a hand over Marcus’s groin, pressing, tracing the outline of his erection behind his jeans. It only lasted a moment, as Marcus urged him then to unbutton his cuffs and slip out of the shirt entirely.

Soft, black-brown hair swept across Tomás’s chest—not too thick, a pleasing scatter.

Marcus placed his palm on Tomás’s breastbone, then slid it up to run his forefinger along the left collar bone to the bicep, smooth and firm under his touch. As Tomás lay back again on the bed, Marcus raised his arm and skimmed his hand over the delicate skin extending from the inside of the elbow to the underarm, where coarser, darker hair sprouted. He could smell Tomás’s sweat, sharp and singular, under the scent of the antiperspirant. He resisted the urge to bury his face in that tuft of hair, instead moving his hand back to Tomás’s chest and the corded column of his neck.

“You are beautiful,” Marcus said.

Tomás averted his eyes. “No.”

“ _Thou art all fair_ ,” Marcus told him. “ _There is no spot in thee._ ”

Tomás’s thick brows drew downward. “The Song of Songs.”

Marcus smiled. “Yes. In the very same Bible of the Gospels. You can’t have one and not the other.”

“What else do you know of it?” asked Tomás, whispering as if those Old Testament passages were forbidden.

Letting his smile deepen, Marcus quoted, “ _His head is as the most fine gold_.” He traced Tomás’s brow. Then he tousled his hair, sending tight-wound curls spiraling askew. “ _His locks are bushy_.” Marcus laughed as Tomás flinched away. “ _And black like a raven_.”

With an expression that read half-furious and half-charmed, Tomás took hold of Marcus’s wrists and pushed them toward the hem of his shirt. “I don’t want to wait anymore,” he said.

“All right,” Marcus whispered. “All right.” He very nearly turned away to take off the shirt, but did not want to subject Tomás to the sight of his scars. Not right now. Marcus let the shirt drop then unfastened his jeans.

“Please,” Tomás said, seeing him hesitate.

After a breath, he eased the jeans and briefs away and let them fall to the carpet. He lay down, pressing into Tomás’s flank and hiding himself from view.

“You don’t like the way you look,” Tomás said.

Marcus shook his head. “Ever the ugly child, I was.” Then fever-warm hands were on his cheek, his neck, drawing him down.

Tomás kissed him, then briefly took Marcus’s lower lip between his teeth. “I don’t want you to hide from me,” he said when he released him.

Marcus pulled Tomás to him, his body and his mouth, trying to touch as much bared skin as he could reach: across the wings of shoulder blades, down the broad back, the narrow waist, the swell of his ass. When he slipped a single finger into the cleft, Tomás sighed into his ear. Marcus stroked lightly with the finger, earning a rigid grip on his forearm, keeping his hand where it was.

“You can,” Tomás said. “I want to.”

“I want it, too,” Marcus said. “Would you rather…” he began. “I mean, I could let you...”

“No,” said Tomás, reaching up to run his fingers over the short brush of hair at Marcus’s temple. “I want it _this_ way. I want you to teach me.”

Words were running like a marquee through Marcus’s head at that moment: _Let me show you everything. I can make you feel so good. I want to be inside you...Christ! I want you so badly. Tomás. Tomás._

_You are mine._

“I’ll try,” was what he said.

“I trust you, Marcus.” And Tomás brought him down again, with hands at the back of his neck, to kiss his lips.

Marcus thought he could be content to kiss him forever, to let the watery, near-winter days circle over their heads. But he was also hard and aching, the brush of Tomás’s smooth hip not nearly enough contact for satisfaction.

He cradled Tomás’s face between his hands and kissed his forehead. “Give me just a moment.” His small travel case lay beside the opposite bed: razor, toothbrush, deodorant. There was also a small bottle of lubricant that he palmed and took back with him.

Marcus poured a little of it over his middle finger. When he tapped his thighs, Tomás raised his knees, setting his feet on the bed. “Good,” said Marcus, and lowered his hand again between Tomás’s legs. He stroked with a slick fingertip for a moment or two, then gently began to push in.

Tomás was breathing deep and steady, his eyes half-closed and lashes fluttering over his cheeks. When Marcus had slipped his finger entirely inside, Tomás let his lips part and a sigh push past them.

Enchanted, Marcus bent to kiss his shoulder, his upraised knee. Tomás was warm and smooth around his finger; he moved it easily in long, slow strokes. All the world was suspended within the muted light of the bedside lamp, as if it had stopped on the edge of a breath.

A car on the access road whispered over wet asphalt.

Marcus watched the face of the man beside him, every hint of movement a reflection of his own actions. He smoothed a dab of the lubricant onto his forefinger and slowly pressed it in alongside the other.

Part of him wanted to ask questions, to search for confirmation. _Does it feel good?_ It had been so very long since he’d done this; Tomás he was sure never had.

Still, he opened beautifully around Marcus’s fingers. Shut his eyes tight and let slip the smallest sounds, searching for pleasure in the newness. His cock began to fill out again.

Marcus slid down and took it in his mouth as he pushed a third finger inside him, and Tomás’s back bowed up as if a rope strung through his ribcage had been pulled taut.

“Yes. Marcus,” he said, breathy and distracted.

Marcus felt fingertips on his scalp. He didn’t want Tomás to come again quite so soon. With some reluctance, he moved away and slid his fingers free. As he knelt between Tomás’s feet, Tomás let his legs part further, inviting Marcus to settle his hips between them. Utterly open, vulnerable. Marcus bit down hard on the inside of his cheek. He was struck just as fatally as Aquinas on the Appian Way. He could die right then between those thighs, and sink to take his last breath with his head on Tomás’s shoulder.

At the same time, his nerves sang with life, magnetized and needing to be paired. Tomás shivered, Marcus stroking his inner thigh while at the same time anointing his own cock with more lubricant. Warmth boiled up from Tomás’s naked skin as Marcus settled over him and began to enter.

Tomás turned his head toward the palm that stroked his cheek, wincing once and taking Marcus’s thumb between his teeth.

“Breathe, darling,” Marcus said. “Breathe.” The tight slickness was dizzying as it enveloped him.

Tomás gasped as he slid in fully.

“Does it hurt?”

“Some,” said Tomás, grasping Marcus’s hand.

Marcus in turn kissed the fingers that held him then gently drew his hand away and wrapped it around Tomás’s cock, pulling it in long, easy strokes. Keeping his hips painstakingly still, he waited until the rigid muscles of the thighs bracketing his waist began to ease and Tomás twisted and pushed into his touch. When he finally allowed himself a first shallow thrust, the moan it drew was extravagant.

Marcus braced himself with a hand on the mattress and thrust again. “Good. You’re doing so well.”

Tomás’s eyes, when he opened them, reflected almost unsettling youth. “I want to make it good. For you.” He gripped Marcus’s bicep and the insistent virility could have crumbled Marcus to dust.

It was unfair to bind up Tomás, and all that he was, in vestments and priestly restraint. By all rights he should be dark and sweating in a desert—with locust and honey and water from the rock. Taking up serpents and raising them to a sky smeared with white ash.

“Shh,” Marcus said. He spat twice in his palm and then bent low over Tomás, working his cock furiously in the arc between their bodies. Fingers clutched at his back, making the crisscrossing scars tingle.

“Marcus... _please_.” Strong thighs contracted and then Tomás was coming, baring his throat and calling out into the still room. Pearl-colored fluid splashed into the notch at the base of his neck and downward over his chest and belly.

Letting loose of Tomás’s spent cock, Marcus dragged his hand upward through the wetness, smearing it in a wide and messy swath across Tomás’s chest. They lay cheek-to-cheek. With panting breath harsh in his ear, Marcus whispered low.

“ _Libera me per hoc sacrosanctum Corpus tuum ab omnibus iniquitatibus meis_.”

If Tomás recognized the stolen words from the Communion Prayer, he said nothing, only raised his hips to bring Marcus deeper.

In turn, Marcus began to move, pressing their bodies together, his mouth against Tomás’s shoulder. Though he had asked for forgiveness of his sins, during his long and often lonely decades in the priesthood, Marcus had not been with another person. He’d touched himself on occasion, wanting and failing to feel guilty about it. When he was given his dispensation to exorcise, he’d stopped confessing altogether. Seeing the things he had seen… Tomás would learn in time that there was as much cause for despair as hope.

But let him have his hard edges for now, blades to slice at the intangible. They would be worn down soon enough and the suffering of others would slide off of him with no place to cling. Maybe by then, God willing, Marcus would be long dead.

He heard his name and shook away the reverie.

“Stay with me,” Tomás begged. “Don’t leave me.”

Marcus kissed him, licked a bead of sweat from the divot under his lower lip. “I’m here.” This time, he intended to mean it. Rising a little, he braced himself on his hands and thrust faster. Their bodies twisted and dripped, the sounds between them vulgar. The only invocations were of the worldly kind: _yes_ and _please_ and _now_.

And when Tomás asked Marcus to come, he did.

 

**

 

A few more hours in the car and the foggy, green Pacific would be near, breaking on shores just as foggy and green. Both the priest and the man had seen that same ocean from warmer places. After Chicago, the time there seemed less like a memory and more a hallucination triggered by a blue hole in the clouds or a familiar touch. If Hildegard of Bingen had seen a macaque in a palm tree she might have called it holy, too.

Tomás said he’d had a premonition: a great house and a weedy coastal island. They were pointed in that direction anyway, so why not follow? Marcus, for his part, distrusted visions. And he, at least, could reach over and touch a warm, naked shoulder and know it was solid and real.

**Author's Note:**

> I am not Catholic. If I got something embarrassingly wrong, feel free to let me know! 
> 
> So many thanks to give! Please go check out my splendiferous beta, [twobrokenwyngs](http://twobrokenwyngs.tumblr.com/) on tumblr! I couldn't have done it without your invaluable help (and you are FAR too kind). Let's just say a lot of important words would have been missing in this fic without you. I must also thank [Cymbelines](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Cymbelines/pseuds/Cymbelines) for introducing us. You've been a great supporter of my writing and a great, great friend.
> 
> [I'm on tumblr](http://nookienostradamus.tumblr.com/), too, if you would like to yell about priest boyfriends. Or anything, really.


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